Paradox
by Maxwell Lily
Summary: Why did Go Ha Jin travel back in time? To turn Wang So into Gwangjong, creating a perfect time loop, at the expense of her own heart? Choi Ji Mong doesn't have the answers. Maybe the universe is kinder than we imagine it to be. [On Ha Jin's time travel]


Choi Ji Mong doesn't know the purpose of it all.

She talks to him between cups of tea. She has shed so many tears her body feels dry, the grains of sand that are too far from the ocean, waiting for the waves that take too long to grace them. Just like the waves, he's not close, he's so far, a millennia, light-years away. He is but a star in the sky now and she's back where she began, penniless and loveless, her only company a man who doesn't know the answers. He used to know so much but there's only so much he can know. Why they couldn't be together. Why happiness had been so short.

 _Gwangjong is a fixed point in time but you being there changed his heart._

She has moments.

Moments where she hates it all, where she hates the way she was thrown back and forth through the stream of time, hates that they had to meet only to be torn apart. _It would have been better to not meet at all._ She's bitter and she cries when she dreams of him. It hurts. Not her chest or her knee or her head anymore but a crippling kind of pain that makes her mother worried sick and her friends whisper behind her back. Meaningless, it was all meaningless, then and now and who knows for how much longer. She wants peace. She gets the snow and the memories instead and after a hundred days it hurts a little less. She looks up at the night sky and outstretches her hand and she can almost feel him beside her. Watching her, the one moment they're together and they're not speaking or fighting or doing anything but enjoying the falling snow. She lies in bed and remembers the fairy tales she used to tell and she can almost feel his hands holding her, see his smile in the dark, she's Scheherazade and she's postponing their happiness for one more night. She makes tea and her mother complains they're too bitter and she tells her she once knew a man who loved her tea, who loved poetry, and her mother says she remembers no such boyfriend and she smiles, the secret a locked door in her heart adorned with the finest designs. She hates, she loves, she balances herself on a tight rope of longing and resignation. Choi Ji Mong pats her hand.

 _You gave him love when he needed the most._

Her feet dangle above the water. She has never felt suicidal, has never wanted to die, she already has, twice in a lifetime, but it all hurts less than the doubt, _could it happen again, if I jump in, would I be able to see him?_ Ji Mong speaks of eclipses and the impossibility of recreation but he had been wrong before. She tilts her head from one side to the other and she looks at her reflection, Go Ha Jin and Hae Soo, co-existing under the afternoon sun of a day with no name. A pebble causes the surface to ripple and the disturbance makes her look up. She doesn't try that day but she feels she may try again. Ji Mong can't stop her. He's stopped her enough.

She hates history.

 _You were able to flourish despite the adversities of the time. You're the most outstanding woman I've ever known._

Sometimes she almost forgets. She watches TV and reads books and works and talks to people about politics and it all feels distant and blurred and unreal. She never sat in a room full of guards who pressed tools against her skin, who bled her and glared her down until she was broken on the ground. She never had her trust broken by the one man she trusted, never had her heart played with, was never manipulated by her best friend even though they were family. Never loved so much but restrained herself for years, in fear of a palace that was like a beast, of her own place and her own heart. Never, never, never. Until she's half-asleep on her couch, her hand dangling in the air like a pendulum pulling her eyelids down and the TV shows a happy ending and a marriage and a child and she has to stand up, to walk away, walk under the stars. She has lost before and she has loved before but mourning never felt so hard. She calls Ji Mong and he speaks of her prince's smile as a child, of Mu's kindness, and together they cope. They don't know the answers behind it all but they cope.

It was good to have known him. It was.

 _You loved them all and they loved you. Isn't that in itself a gift?_

Their eyes meet from across the street.

She's half anguish, half euphoria, round eyes filled disbelief. The umbrella falls to the sidewalk and with every step he takes, she's sure something is going to happen, she'll blink and he'll be gone, merely a mirage conjured by a heart that couldn't let go. But wasn't she starting to let go, little by little, baby steps, smiling at the memories because they were memories, healing and getting back to her Go Ha Jin life? At that moment, her chest aches like Hae Soo's. He stands before her and his height is the same, the wrinkle at the corner of his eyes when he smiles, his black hair framing his face. When he speaks, his voice is the very same.

"I've found you, my Soo."

She falls and he catches her.

Choi Ji Mong doesn't understand anything, after all.

 _The eclipse brought us together, and the people we were before disappeared._

He's more patient than she expected him to be. They run through the streets and all the while the tears and the rain blind her. At his place, he allows her to compose herself, gives her clothes — they smell of him beneath the smell of soap — , but she's far from composure, she falls apart when she sees his smile and she apologizes for everything, she hits her fists against his shoulder, asks him what took him so long, and he takes it all, apology and anger, holds her loosely when she's thrashing around, holds her tightly when she's weak. She remembers he hurt too, it's what tore them apart, but he comforts her like his pain matters little. The cosmic answer to his presence is something she can never conjecture but on that night, she calls her mother to tell her she'll sleep out and she clings to him like they're pole opposites that couldn't be torn apart. She's tired when she falls asleep and she doesn't know what to do with herself when she wakes up, she doesn't want to do anything else but look at him, breathe him, be enveloped in his warmth.

 _I think it's always been him._

"I'm sorry it took me so long to come to you," he says, and she's brought back, it's everything she wanted to hear, then and now and forever in inconstant time.

 _The force that pulled me on that day._

He doesn't let her go the entire day, barely letting her make her phone calls. She'll talk to him about in due time, he can't be the center of her universe and they both know it but he wants to be selfish and she wants too and she allows the little mistakes. She asks him about his life and he tells her he adapted better than he thought he would, probably memories of the body he took two years prior. Go Ha Jin feels sorry for the man he used to be, like the Hae Soo she never knew, and hopes that those two can meet as well, in a different reality. Maybe they'll fall in love. She giggles at the thought, a twenty-first century man falling in love with a tenth century noble woman. Her So doesn't understand her laughter but he smiles back.

 _I think he drew me back in time and back again when I died._

Together they promise not to keep anything from each other again.

 _To love him like no one would at the time._

When she steps outside his apartment, she turns around and he's looking at her, waving with a strained smile, one foot down the steps like he could run towards her at any minute.

 _To love me like no one would at my time._

She looks down with an embarrassed smile before she closes the distance between them, circling his middle with her arms, holding him tightly like on the other day her wait ended, on the day he showered her with all the love they had been holding back for years. A millennia now. It all mirrors itself. A repetition, a parallel. He's her constant, her weight, her ground. Her gravity.

 _Ji Mong, I think he broke time for me._

His kiss is sweet and she feels she'll have many mistakes to correct in the future, in this twenty-first century, both his and hers, because he feels like everything to her. The center of the universe.

 _I think we're a paradox created because we wanted love._

It holds no scientific explanation but it holds truth.

Choi Ji Mong looks happy.

Above all, he looks hopeful.


End file.
